I spend a lot of time in email at work - to the detriment of a lot of other stuff, actually. My default setup at work is Outlook on 2/3 of the screen, with Teams on the other 1/3. That's my "background", then I have anything I'm currently working on over the top, like a document or VS Code. During yesterday's Microsoft outage the company I work for had no email, and Teams was working sporadically. So instead of my default behaviour of immediately checking my emails, I opened my to do list an...

Bengaluru (Nov. 13, 2026) – Shield today announced it has opened an engineering office at the GoodWorks GCC Nexus in Bengaluru, where Indian engineers will develop and test autonomy software for Indian aircraft and defence systems to support India’s goal of self-reliance in defence. The team will work on Hivemind , Shield’s software platform for developing, deploying and operating autonomous systems. Bengaluru is Shield’s second office in India; the company opened its New Delhi office ...

Between amber leaves The fluttering bird dances — Making a new home? Between amber leaves The fluttering bird dances — Making a new home? Between amber leaves The fluttering bird dances — Making a new home?

When we use LLMs in a specialized domain, such as the operations of any reasonably-large organization, there is a lot of specialized vocabulary. Such words and specialized meanings will be foreign to an LLM because they aren't in its training set, making it harder for the LLM to be effective when doing tasks in that domain. One technique to aid this is to use an LLM to generate a glossary of the terminology in that domain, and make this glossary available for any LLMs doing work in t...

Ufuk made a comment that he enjoyed my description of SSA from bytecode in Aaron’s livestream with me . While filming the livestream—an intro to ZJIT internals—I got a little nervous that people would shy away from our 1900 line add_iseq_to_hir function. This function is responsible for converting CRuby’s stack based bytecode for the YARV virtual machine into a high-level SSA IR for ZJIT to analyze and optimize. It takes bytecode that looks roughly like this: push 3 push 4 add ...

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems… — Whitehead , An Introduction to Mathematics (1911) Notation is important. The right one can be a tool that makes working through some problems possible at all. It was always challenging to explore Keyhive’s design in plain prose or with existing notations. Whatever you think of APL , Iverson ’s Turing Award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought , is a gr...

Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping . The beeps were far enough apart that standing in the room and trying to determine the source of the noise was frustrating, and I really didn't want to dig through every one of those boxes. So I had Claude Code build Beep Locator , a software system for triangulating the source of a mysterious beep using multiple devices scatter...

By a mile, the iPhone Duo has garnered more questions about what I think about it than any other phone I’ve ever had. It’s clearly a phone that has people intrigued, so I thought I’d jot down some loose, unorganized thoughts about what I think about it after about ten days. If I could sum all my thoughts up into one word, it’d simply be “fun”. I think for the vast majority of people, myself included, the iPhone 18 Pro is a more practical phone that through scientific analysis y...

Magdeburg, Germany | November 2026 Fujifilm X-T4 Fujifilm XF 16–55 ƒ/2.8 R LM WR II 16mm (24mm) | ƒ/16 | 1/30s | ISO 160 After my first "ICM painting" , I've added this technique to my toolbox. Here's a recent shot on a sunny autumn day. Reply via email Magdeburg, Germany | November 2026 Fujif...

You know when you enter a dark rail (or road) tunnel after running above ground for a while, and it takes your eyes a moment to adjust to the lower light? Then when you pop up above the surface on the other side of the tunnel, the onslaught of light forces your eyes to adjust again? This is how focus feels to me sometimes. I’ll get so into a topic or project, that being pulled out is light being blinded by my surroundings. I suppose that’s why they call it tunnel vision. I also feel as...

Why do many people hate working in large tech companies? The obvious answer is “because organizational dysfunction stops them from doing the things they want to do”. Engineers like to write code and ship things, and if their company’s dysfunction is preventing that, it’ll make them unhappy. Right? Some people just hate messiness I don’t think so, actually. If that were the case, those people would be interested in understanding the dysfunction and learning how to work around it, ...

One of my ongoing research interests is understanding the nature of technological progress: How does new technology come into the world and improve over time? What sort of factors affect it? How, in general, should we think about it? I’ve come at this question from a few different angles: posts looking at the operations and legacy of Bell Labs, posts looking at how specific technologies improved over time, posts looking at how frequent multiple invention is and how long we wait for ...

I see a lot of discussion around “TUI vs. GUI” for coding agents. This discussion is often of the form: “the more I use Claude Code/Codex/Pi, the more I’ve outgrown the TUI and want to use a GUI app”. The comment that nudged me to write this is in this recent HN discussion : I used to use ChatGPT/Claude in the TUI up until like 3 months ago, but my usage of LLMs has exploded - many sessions across many projects. I feel like I outgrew the TUI and now I’m using ChatGPT/Claude desk...

Each fall I try to predict the upcoming job market for theoretical computer science faculty and give suggestions to those pursuing these positions. Last year I wrote  that we should get set for a rocky ride, with AI’s disruption of computer science, fiscal stress at universities, and new U.S. policies affecting visas and funding. Rocky indeed. The job market for computer science graduates continues to decline and with it undergraduate enrollment in the discipline. That should crater demand f...

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by the LEV-2 crawler bot (inset image) and India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter (background). An arrow points to the tiny lander on the image’s right. Images: JAXA / TOMY / SONY / ISRO / Chandra Tungathurthi This story pieces together insights from experts at JAXA, NASA, and ISRO. On January 19, 2024, Japan’s solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating Moon ( SLIM) lander made a lopsided-but-successful touchdown on Earth’s cosmic companion. ...

By Shreya S Ramanujam , Yongce Li , Afshine Amidi , Sina Ghiassian , Benjamin Klein . Introduction Picture this — you’re home after a long day at work and can’t wait to catch up on Bridgerton. You log on to Netflix, search for “Bridgerton” and land on this screen: If this sounds familiar, you already know what a synopsis is — it’s a short glimpse into what a viewer can expect to see in a show. We see two types of synopses here: a series-level synopsis describing th...

Is it ever OK to write blog posts with AI? NO! was my strident cry until just a week or two ago (it was, actually, a much less polite version of that). Now, I’m wondering if I need to refine that view. Let me explain. You see, I have a particularly vitriolic feeling when presented with LLM-generated text. Articles written with AI give me the ick, I don’t trust them, and I lose respect for the author. I’m not the only one who feels this way; consider this finding from a survey by Cy...

The Creature The Creature. The creature approaches. Within its mouth it carries a spit-drenched ball made of felt. As you reach for its head, the creature bends away, its body language signaling an unwillingness to make eye-contact. It does not desire your hand, not while it is carrying the ball. (Frankly, even if it’s not carrying the ball you find it hard to tell whether the creature enjoys being touched, or is just neutral to it.) You pull back. Perhaps two minute...

Nothing really exists in isolation. Almost every part of our lives exists in a network. Consciousness arises from what neurons do together, life from what genes and proteins do together, society from what we do together. When researchers began mapping real-world networks in the 1990s – from the World Wide Web to Hollywood actors linked by films – they found that wildly different systems shared… Source Nothing really exists in isolation. Almost every part of our lives exists in a network...

The Unix command line is the most successful user interface ever built, and also the worst one we are stuck with. It was assembled over half a century, one tool at a time, by people optimizing for their own fingers on a keyboard. The result is overlapping responsibilities, inconsistent flags, and names that mean nothing to anyone who was not there when they were invented. That didn’t matter when the only consumers were people willing to memorize its quirks; it matters a great deal now that th...

Contents Click on the blue boxes to go to the corresponding section: futures pre The Present asi Do we reach ASI? pre->asi misuse Misuse Doom pre->misuse butler Butlerian Jihad pre->butler align Do we solve alignment? asi->align Yes auto Full automation? asi->auto No whatkind What kind of alignment? align->whatkin...

This post demonstrates how to use monads in the Lean programming language (Lean 4, to be specific). If you're not familiar with Lean, this part of the language is very similar to other functional programming languages, like Haskell or OCaml. Motivating example - evaluating expressions Suppose we want to write a simple numerical expression evaluator that supports numbers with addition and division: inductive Expr where | num : Int → Expr | add : Expr → ...

For our last movie night we watched Princess Mononoke . I remembered loving that movie when I was younger, but watching it as an adult made me once again realize how Miyazaki has a way of expressing diverging sides without picking one. The film shows people, animals and spirits with legitimate and largely incompatible needs, and each faction is further engaged in infighting. A central arc of the story is Lady Eboshi’s Irontown, which gives people who were largely rejected by society work,...